Doing nothing for roads, transit would cost Houston dearly

The Houston skyline is seen behind traffic on the Ship Channel in January 2014.

Photo: Smiley N. Pool, Staff

Picture a Sugar Land that looks like Uptown, where it might take as long to get to Houston as it does to get to The Woodlands now.

Without carefully planned investments in roads and transit, that’s likely to be the price of growth facing area motorists in 20 years.

A lack of consensus on regional transportation strategy limits progress: One side argues that widening freeways simply fuels suburban sprawl; the other sees any investment in transit as part of a war on cars.

A stalemate between the two camps is a nightmare scenario. Pro-transit efforts to scuttle road expansion could gather steam and refocus efforts on rail and bus projects. Transit projects, however, often linger on the vine in Houston so long that their benefits come too late. This is Houston, where the car is the once and future king.

Now imagine the Houston area when the population isn’t 6.2 million, but 9 million, as it’s projected to be in 2035. Imagine this many people getting around on the current system: 18,000 lane-miles of streets and a limited transit network.

If most newcomers drive, they will bring area roads to a standstill. Freeways will be more clogged for longer distances. Traffic on city streets, especially those inside Loop 610, will all but grind to a halt, especially if more people live within the loop.

“That risks not only our quality of life, but our prosperity in the future,” Stephen Klineberg, co-director of the Kinder Center for Urban Research at Rice University, warned transit officials meeting in Houston last year.

Though regional leaders have grandiose plans for bigger, better freeways and bold new transit options, it’s not hard for planners to imagine what will happen if the Houston area doesn’t build wisely. If bickering or inaction leads to little being achieved, the sprawl that’s eaten away at so much of southeast Texas will just get worse, said Tony Voigt, a Houston-based researcher with the Texas A&M Transportation Institute.

“We would see businesses go from the use of consolidated facilities or campuses to a satellite office structure,” Voigt said, describing a system many companies in Los Angeles use now. “Major companies might have an office downtown, but they would also have satellites in the Woodlands, Katy, Uptown, Midtown, Med Center, Sugar Land, Clear Lake, and other emerging ‘livable centers,’ as well as being focused at locations along the light rail lines. You would work closer to where you live to reduce the time in travel to something acceptable, or you would work via telecommute or other remote technologies. This would be a reaction to increasing cost of living in the urban core – not everyone could or would choose to live urban.”

This trend has been in the works over the past 40 or more years, said Tim Lomax, also with the transportation institute. Lomax is one of the principal authors of the Urban Mobility Report that tracks traffic in major U.S. cities.

“We’ve had generally declining mobility since about 1970. Population has increased much faster than roads and transit, and what’s happened? Homes moved to suburbs – probably more for home price and size and school reasons than for purely traffic reasons -- and job sites have chased them,” Lomax said. “Commuting has become something you endure because of several other great things you have in the ‘burbs.”

But this calculation only holds up for so long, Lomax said. When getting to work becomes too difficult, people consider changing their residence or their job.

“Looking at settlement patterns,” he said, “it seems clear that people moved their job to the suburbs more often than moved their home clear in -- downtown is less than 10 percent of the metro job market, where it used to be 25-ish percent.”

Under the do-nothing scenario, Voigt predicted density inside Beltway 8 would accelerate as people focused on shortening their drives. No longer able to commute across town easily, people will cluster close to jobs, likely driving up home prices.

“Shopping becomes less ‘Texas-sized’ at that point and you’ll see more retail under residential in multi-story units,” Voigt said. “Some portions of the Houston streetscape may start to look more like Washington, Boston and New York than it does now, but hopefully keeping with a uniquely Houston feel. We begin to see really wide sidewalks in Midtown and other areas (10-15 feet wide) as more people are walking and the capacity is needed there instead of in the street.”

Proponents of urban-centric development will rejoice at this prospect, but recent experience shows that increasing density without the tools to accommodate it can be painful for neighborhoods. Single-family houses are replaced with midrise multi-family housing. Tree-lined sidewalks give way to apartments built right to the curb. Streets become clogged with more cars. Water and sewer lines strain to keep up with greater demand as the city balks at the high cost of bulking up infrastructure.

Moreover, what Houston possesses that many major metros do not is abundant, developable land and access to ports and planes. We’re less Silicon Valley and more Manufacturing Meadows.

Still, crossing meadows take time, and eventually those distances don’t pan out. No matter how wide transportation officials make Interstate 10, Sealy is still 42 miles from Loop 610. Even at 80 mph it would take more than 30 minutes to get there, and some businesses and their workers are not going to tolerate that distance.

“At some point the individual will figure out they have more personal liberty and freedom if they can choose to spend those travel time hours doing something else than sitting in a car,” Voigt said.

Officials sometimes hate to admit it, as they celebrate freeway and tollway openings, but they cannot build their way out of gridlock.

Nor can they un-build their way out of the congestion.

“Look at Austin,” Lomax said. “They had a policy of not investing in transportation for a long time but people kept showing up. Now they’re trying to catch up, but in the interim they’ve probably lost some opportunities for growth.”

Voigt and Lomax agree the solution isa combination of adding lanes, offering options such as buses and commuter rail and developing in a way that minimizes how often residents must travel long distances.

“We aren’t going to add three more lanes to each direction of Katy Freeway,” Lomax said, “So we need a bunch of 10 percent improvement kinds of solutions, rather than one great panacea project.”